The Book Busting Menopause Myths That Women (and Their Doctors) Believe

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Estrogen causes breast cancer. Gaining weight and belly fat are inevitable. In this episode, I'm sharing with you a new book that is busting menopause myths that women and too many of their doctors believe. In this episode, I interview the pair of authors offering refreshing insight to a global audience of midlife and beyond women who are often sheltered from all the health options available to them and misinformed or completely uninformed. Stay tuned to the end if fat burning is something you want to know more about. And I know, trick question, right? Kristen and Maria present the concept of fat burning and becoming fat adapted in a way that makes it easy to understand why what you've been trying to do may not be working for you at all. So join us in this episode for the news about this book and what's inside, which goes far beyond the valuable practical tips that you'll get from it. This is about the book and why it's about time time you had this book. Kristen Johnson is board certified in holistic nutrition through the National Association of Nutritional Professionals, is a functional nutritional therapy practitioner through the Nutritional Therapy Association, and is a recovering corporate attorney. Maria Claps is a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and is a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. Together, Kristen and Maria have developed a deep specialty in perimenopause and menopause health through their clinical mentorships with multiple medical doctors and naturopaths specializing in hormone replacement therapy. They have both completed advanced training in various functional testing modalities, which they actively use in their robust clinical practice educating and helping midlife women. Kristen and Maria are also the co-creators of a professional training program for other midlife women's health practitioners. I cannot wait to have you listen to this interview. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made for menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Kristen Johnson and Maria Claps, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

We're glad to be back.

I feel like I want to show off for you, and actually I should show all of these. I've just taken these off and put them down here, but this in my book is the sign of a good book. I haven't been able to bring myself to bring a pen to it, but I do underline and highlight and all kinds of things. That when it's got Post-it notes throughout, that's a sign of a good book. So, The Great Menopause Myth, new book. Congratulations. I told both of you behind the scenes, and I want you to hear it, listeners. This is a great book. This is a book I wish I would have written myself. So I think you should all get it. And I want you to hear not just about the guts of what's in the book, which is a lot of practical application and knowledge that you need to get, from two people who are not here necessarily as physicians, which is actually in my mind an asset when it comes to this book because they're you, they're me. And I want you to hear about some of the unique things that are in here and some of the really just elephant in the room things that other people are not necessarily saying. But I want to go backward for a minute And when did the two of you start working together?

Oh gosh, 2018, 2019 is when we started together. We'd both been working separately on our own, kind of doing very much what we're doing now, but burning ourselves out doing it alone.

Talk to me, any hesitation about collaboration, working with somebody else, and you had this all, you know, proprietary thing or an audience yourself and you had yours and then, you know, you know, we're gonna get married and have baby audiences together. I mean, how does that all work without feeling defensive or selfish or vulnerable?

We kind of dated each other, to be perfectly honest, for lack of a better word. I mean, we'll take the metaphor all the way. I joke she's my work wife. But we did— we both had our own thing going, and I encountered Maria in terms of some education programs that she was doing, and she was looking for a little bit of help servicing her clients, and I kind of stepped into that role and So we still kept our own thing for a while, and then we were both like, we kind of had an arc and we'd sort of reached the end of that arc in terms of it was kind of project-based what we were doing. And we were like, I don't really want to stop working with you. And, and like, I actually have come back to enjoying my work. And it was mostly we had each other, you know, to call or to stay on after a client call and sort of troubleshoot and figure out how to help them the best and whatnot. And honestly, it was like, okay, if we're going to do this, we have to either do it all the way or we just shouldn't do it at all. We're both pretty like lone wolf type ladies. And we were like, okay, I've never done this before, but let's get married and make this a business marriage. And we decided if we were going to do it, it was full legal. Like it was a legal partnership. It was a shared bank account. I mean, it was. The whole kit and caboodle in terms of joining two people together. And I think in doing that, it was like, okay, there was no out. There was never going to be a clean or pretty out if this wasn't going to work out. But, you know, we've been blessed with now 5, 6, 7 years together and it's been pretty amazing.

What a great way to do it. So I know, and I'm sure you know too, that there are health and fitness pros listening to your podcast behind the scenes. So for all of you who are thinking about it, or women who are in other industries, what a great way to get started, get your foot in the water, learn, are you compatible? Does this work? Do you complement each other? I want to read the title out loud of this book. And I want to point this out to listeners. We talked about this behind the scenes. I rarely do this, by the way. I don't do it this way. Someone who publishes a new book or they publish a summit, and they wanna come on and they wanna talk about that thing. And that's not the news, right? The news is what it is you're helping my listener learn and do differently or think about differently. And so I usually spin it backwards and say, we'll mention that, but let's do it at the end after they know, love, and trust you. You guys have been here before, number one, I've been with you as well. And I want to do this the other way because of this book and the way that you've written it. So I first want everybody to know, title-wise, The Great Menopause Myth: The Truth on Mastering Midlife Hormonal Mayhem, Beating Uncomfortable Symptoms, and Aging to Thrive. So that's what it is. So inside of this book are some very unique things that I'm going to pull out in our time together. We can't possibly go chapter by chapter because there's so much here that's good. But it's better. It's more inclusive of the things that many people are not telling you enough. They're doing an overview. These guys go deep and they go deep so that you understand how to continue to go deeper yourself. Literally telling you, how do I understand research? What's a good study? What's not so good? What matters most when it comes to studies? And that's important. So the word science-backed, science-based are now a marketing term, right? Everybody's using that, and it really doesn't mean as much as we once thought. So don't be fooled by that. But there's something here that I first want to pull out, and that is you have this chapter called Menopause Gold Rush. Oh my God, and I couldn't agree more, but Talk to me about the birth of that chapter. Where did that come from? If you could summarize, or if ChatGPT could summarize that for us, what would it say?

ChatGPT is not a silent partner in this book. I'll just add that.

And honestly, we were shocked to learn how many people use ChatGPT to write books. We were like, we didn't know that was a thing. But yeah, you know, naive on that. Yeah.

So we have been doing this work together for about 6 years, but we had been doing this work even prior to being together for, say, a few years before that. And Deb, it's— it was always about midlife health and hormonal decline and perimenopause and menopause. And, you know, we were kind of throwing up posts on Instagram saying something like, menopause is a default state of inflammation. Years ago. I mean, like 8 years ago. And that was met with surprise. I'll just put it to you that— put— say it that way. And now we're hearing a lot of other people saying that. And, you know, look, we can't, like, can't copyright a phrase, or can we, Kristen?

I don't know.

Technically we could, but it would be harder.

Yeah, I will say we don't want to, right? And we want information to get out there. But now we're seeing, well, like, it seems to be, it's having a moment, probably started in earnest, I would say 4 or 5 years ago, around that. And, you know, with the increased awareness is a lot of, we'll say, kind of sideline stuff. And the sideline stuff is gonna be the supplements. And we're not anti-supplement, but boy, just a little foreshadowing. Kristen and I often talk, if we could bring 2 things to a desert island, it would be our HRT clean water with our electrolytes, you know. So again, we're not anti-supplement, but, you know, is this not too much that we really, really, really need? And we just see, like, for instance, I am going to pick on supplement companies just a little bit, okay? They can handle it because we all have this outsized love affair with supplements as Americans. But, you know, stuff to balance your hormones, like, that doesn't exist. It just does not exist, particularly in perimenopause or Even worse in menopause, you can't balance anything that's not there. And then you just have a whole kind of swath of people presenting themselves as menopause experts, and it's a little dubious when, you know, you're 43, 44, 45, and you want to like talk about HRT and you're not even on it yourself. I mean, now granted, you do not have to be on it to be an expert. Some of our best mentors, you know, one of our best mentors is a male physician, okay? But that's a physician who's got, you know, say, 2 decades of experience working with women in this field. You've got like a new health coach who wants to start messaging on menopause. Okay, fine. We all do start somewhere, but maybe kind of sit down and learn first before you kind of talk about menopause. And you get things wrong. We've seen like de facto numbers and things wrong, people putting things out. So that's a big part of the menopause gold rush right now, is that, yeah, it's just, it's a market opportunity.

And, you know, I don't mean— Maria always bristles a little bit because I can get kind of salty on this, but women have become the prey, to be perfectly frank. And it's very frustrating because what we see are individuals in this space sort of repackaging themselves overnight, legitimately overnight, some of them, into experts, and they're leveraging an MD or OB-GYN after their name and using that to essentially promote themselves into this expert status. And what's frustrating with that is if anyone paid attention to those people 2 years ago, they were talking about birth control and maybe fertility or Pap smears. They had zero platform related to menopause and HRT. And even if they've just you know, now practicing HRT, 2 years does not an expert make. And it's very frustrating because what we see is a lot of these people are great with soundbites, phenomenal marketing machines. They've kind of all joined together like this sort of frenemy group of physicians in this space, and they're amplifying a message they want you to hear because they're controlling the message. And that's the piece that's frustrating to us because there's so much more nuance to it. There's— we, having been doing this so much longer than them, know what they're not saying to women. And it starts to become this sort of David and Goliath environment for me and Maria, who are just these two little nutritionist health coaches who've been doing this for almost a decade, at least, and then these folks with these huge platforms. So, it's been a little frustrating. We didn't write the book for that reason, but we wanted to open with that to let women know, like, look, yes, the awareness is good. This is a good thing that we're all talking about it more. Yeah, but unfortunately the information is not good out there still, no matter who's still spewing it and claiming expert status. So that's the frustrating piece of it, because they're distracting women with either products or they're distracting them with almost a sociopolitical discussion about is menopause a state of deficiency, should it be medicalized, are we going to be mad at men because we have menopause. Like, there's this bizarre sort of tribalism around how you're going to package yourself as a postmenopausal woman. None of that is necessary. It's— this is not helping women. And that's where we get really frustrated.

Amen.

Okay. What are your thoughts on what's happening with Drew Barrymore? So she captures her hot flash on national TV. Halle Berry, you know, people who are coming out as quote unquote spokesperson for menopause. And behold, there's some product behind it and some money behind that as well, hence the menopause gold mine. But what are your thoughts on that?

It's marketing and it's a distraction. It's a distraction away from what is really the issue, which is, yeah, fundamental.

There's the everywomanish sort of spin that they're trying to put on that, and I'm like, I'm sorry, but Drew Barrymore, you are not every woman, and Halle Berry, like, wonderful to use your platform to maybe get congressional awareness because that's now you're going to be the hill you're going to die on. But these people have personal trainers and they have chefs and they have a different level of stress and they don't have the economic issues facing a lot of women out there. They're not having to make decisions between can I get something that's not covered by health insurance or do I need to be restricted to what my health insurance is going to cover, etc. And also, their focus has been on symptoms. And this is such a huge problem because symptom— there's always a shiny object fix for that, right? That's the supplement product.

Yeah.

And this is where we try and hit home in the book. Look at, ladies, whether you have symptoms or not, because some women don't, is so irrelevant to what menopause means as a health imperative for you as you age.. And if women don't be— get told soon that hot flash or no hot flash, menobelly or no menobelly, anxiety or no anxiety. Yes, we don't wanna deny women's lived experience that these are uncomfortable things, but they're actually not the bogey we should be focused on.

Yeah. Oh, I love that. Definitely. And I feel like there's this fearmongering. Like we keep tapping into it. And I think, so it was a couple of years back. I just started meditating for the first time ever.

Right.

And got started with Joe Dispenza and started, and it's life-changing. It is game-changing. And he really is one of those, don't share everything and positive thoughts and what you're thinking. And I mean, of course, what you think about most of the time you attract, but a woman in midlife who starts even looking at one thing about menopause, the next thing you're going to go on and you're going to learn 68 or 200 100 symptoms. This is how you know you're in menopause. It's going to tell you, you're going to feel like shit. You're going to look like shit. You're going to, I mean, that's it. And so we are all being brought up to expect to hate it, to hate what happens to us, who we become. I mean, I really hate this for women. It's a dangerous place to be if that's our expectation.

Well, and it also— if we're focused on menopause as the cause of all these symptoms, we completely gaslight ourselves on how maybe some of our daily habits could be actually driving the symptoms, and it's not menopause itself. And we'll have women come to us and they're like, I need HRT because I can't sleep at night, you know. And they're just— I mean, they've got this litany. It's like they read one of the lists, signs of low estrogen, and then they read it. And we're like, really? Because we just looked at your food journal and you only have coffee until about 2 in the afternoon. Then you don't eat any protein. You count daily walks with your dog as movement. You're staying on your phone until 2 in the morning and you're scrolling and et cetera. And we're like, maybe we need to back it up and stop blaming menopause for everything. And I, to me, I don't know, Rhea, what do you think?

I mean, that's kind of, oh no. Yeah, no, you make a very good point, but I think what Deb is referring to about us really kind of hating menopause is, I would say it's probably twofold. And, and that is, is, you know, we, we do live in an ageist society, right? And so there's this sense of like youthfulness, right? Everyone wants to maintain their youthfulness. And the reality is, despite every intervention, the body's going to change, and we will change. And I think there's so much we can do to maintain our health and even to a certain degree, much smaller, our like looks, our physical presence. But we're just like, at 55, we're not gonna look the way we did at say 32. And I think that's driving a lot of the kind of fear and disdain of menopause. It's like, yeah. And I know like Kristen and I, and for, again, for years and years, we, just came out and we'd be like, we're postmenopausal women, we need to be able to speak this without like this overhang of shame.

Like, it's perfectly okay. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I, I think there's a clip by one of the more recent quote-unquote menopause fitness experts who's got a recent book out, and that quote was ending with something like wish I would have, or educate yourself about menopause, about what's coming, because it's coming. I mean, she said it as if she wanted to instill fear in a 30-year-old. I mean, like, why are we doing that?

Yeah, we hear— we talk to the 30-year-olds all the time. We're like, you, A, you have an opportunity. Learning, yes, great, but that's because you can make sure that you aren't the one driving some of the poor outcomes that, as your hormones change, But also, newsflash, ladies, I wouldn't trade 30 for my 55 ever. So if you honestly think that like this is this horrible thing, newsflash, Marie and I are living our best damn lives and I would never go back to my 30s and 40s. So we're also trying to give that message, right? It's like, this is an amazing time of life. We have fewer responsibilities. We have refusing to apologize for things in our life. Everything I have, whether it's my crow's feet or my little belly, I earned, I smiled a lot and I gave birth to babies. There is nothing wrong with that. And so we're very kind of reluctant to buy into that mentality of, oh, you know, dread, dread it. I'm like, I don't dread it. This is awesome. It's the best time of my marriage, best time of my life.

So yeah, totally agree. I turned 60 this year and there's something about just like, I think for me it was a wake-up call, not like a scary, I'm getting old, but more like Oh, what the heck? I don't care what anybody thinks. It's— I can't wait anymore. I'm not putting this off. I'm just going to do this. I don't care what anybody thinks. Doesn't really matter anymore. So, I mean, there's freedom that comes with that I never had before. It's pretty awesome.

Yeah.

Hey, this is Debra Atkinson, and there is one thing you can't do in the gym at your age. And that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself, not only to get the protein but the fiber, the fruits and vegetables I want daily, I started drinking a smoothie a day 30 years ago. But when I realized all the junk, the sugar, and the extras that you don't want, that I don't want, hiding in most protein powders. That's when I finally caved in after years of saying I will never ever ever sell supplements. Stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning after workouts by always being prepared. Look, yep, I agree, real food first, but it's just not convenient to carry a turkey sandwich. Sometimes the protein and Don't forget the fiber. They kill cravings and they boost satiety. And you've got to make it easy to do the right thing. You can use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at Flipping50.com today. Okay, so for listeners, if you're here and you're like, where's the juicy stuff about menopause and how I make that better? We are going to get to something that you're going to be really interested in terms of using fuel, how to burn fat. I promise you that because they have a unique approach to that as well. But before we get there, I want to pick up on this one more thing that is very unique to this book. And it's a term that everybody listening is familiar with. You've used it 100 times or more in the course of our lives, potentially every day at work, depending on what you do. But informed consent. You have an entire chapter on that and the meaning of that and what is happening and what isn't happening, but you really kind of nailed the medical society. And so talk to me about informed consent, the concept of writing that chapter. Where was that born? I mean, I imagine the two of you up at midnight talking together on the phone, and I don't know, But this is, first of all, it's brilliant and it says something that very few are saying, but it's their responsibility and they're not doing it.

Yeah. I mean, we're not giving women information as to what their choice may or may not mean for their long-term health. We're unfortunately, we have a generation of doctors who are either completely clueless And so they're denying women any sort of medical approach to menopause, which I say that, and I'm sure people are like, I don't want a medical approach to menopause. Well, trust me, folks, you don't probably want a medical approach to aging then either. And a medical approach to aging is about 12 prescriptions to keep your bones, your brain, your sleep, and everything else going. So medical approach to menopause is gonna be truly restoring your hormones. Whether you choose to do that or not, you have to understand what that choice means. What you— if you choose not to do it, that's perfectly fine. But know what sort of exposure you are left with when it comes to the natural processes of aging. If you choose to do it, you better know more than your doctor about what your options are with respect to hormone therapy, because most doctors are very much required to sort of carry the conventional torch. They're carried to use the talking points of the medical societies to which they belong. And they're going to choose for you what they are comfortable administering to you. And that is not informed consent. They should be giving you all of your options. They should be describing what they are capable of doing, what they are not capable of doing, how they differ. And then you should be the one making the choice. And that is not happening in the menopause space. Women are absolutely being force-fed whatever their physician is comfortable with, whatever their training bias might be, whatever their medical society talking points might be. That's not informed consent. I mean, Marie and I sit there, we hear about these women being given certain interventions, whether they're hormone therapy or not, and we're like, this is straight up malpractice. But in the menopause space, it's acceptable because it's completely wild, wild west, and you're only gonna get what your physician wants to do for you, which may or may be nothing, to be perfectly frank. That's the other thing is some physicians will tell women directly to their face, it'll pass.

Okay. So. Let's come back to Western-trained doctors. I mean, this is fairly typical, and I would say this problem is emerging because of all of the baby boomers who've gone through, and they started this for all of us. You guys are not even baby boomers anymore, are you? I'm the tail end. You're not? Okay, I babysat you.

Okay, so, but Eugenics.

Yeah, they laid this foundation for us of, we're not willing to put up with that. Like, what else do you got? Give me another answer. I'm not going to settle for that. And so now we all don't have to, but we're still, I think, unpacking it. We're still kind of unpacking what is right, what is not right. And I think women are in this place of, I don't know if I should trust this doctor. I don't know if I should keep going down this path, or should I get a new doctor? And if I want to get a new doctor, where do I start? And this is just like moving. I'm living in Phoenix, it's hot as hell. I really want to move back to Colorado. And yet it's like so much easier to stay put. I'm like, I'm choosing to stay miserable, but that's kind of what it's like if you're working with a doctor. It's like hard to change. How do I know if the next one is better than this one I have? And I think we say, well, maybe I could be worse off. Maybe it'll be, you know, they won't take care of me and I won't like that. But Western-trained docs are not necessarily trained at all. I mean, minutes, like, of education about menopause, right?

Even OB-GYN are saying they don't even get that anymore. And your point about the inertia— I mean, what is a woman— would you think, if I'm having a female problem, who's the doctor I'm going to go see? My OB-GYN, right? And in most instances, that individual is someone who, if you've had children, helped you birth your children. So we have this incredible affinity and attachment towards them, which is understandable. We also have made assumptions that because they deal with lady parts, they know what they're doing, right? And so they go to their OB-GYN, and it never crosses a woman's mind that this gynecologist is completely flying blind and is only going to tell you what they're comfortable with, which might in fact be hormones are dangerous, Therefore, we don't want to do this. You don't want to do this. And they make the decision for these women.

Hmm. Or they underdose women and occasionally they will get overdosed with the pellet. So Deb, we like to say that we get this question all the time, almost daily. Can I get a referral to a doctor who can do HRT with me? And we say, we don't ask them where they are. We get that a lot. Like, ladies, you do not need someone in your geographic area. You will limit yourself if that's what you stick to. But what do you want? Well, I want HRT. Well, but that can run the gamut. What do you, what are your health goals? Do you just want to get rid of symptoms? Because if that's the case, you can do one thing that's very, very common in a lot of the kind of NAMS menopause doctors are fine with it. And, or do you want to have protect your best chances against protection from the diseases of chronic diseases of aging? So until you can identify what you want for your health goals and what all of your options are, and I know it sounds like, oh, a lot, but I had a woman tell me, well, I would like to leave that up to my doctor. I'm like, well, good luck. Because no, because again, you could get something that grossly underdoses you, grossly overdoses you.

You know, they set it and forget it. That's the other thing is we see this even with a woman could be, let's say, okay, we had a woman who came to us, she was on thyroid medication, she was on T4, levothyroxine for 15 years, had never had a dosing adjustment. In addition to never having a dosing adjustment, she had only been tested for TSH and T4. Well, anyone who knows anything about thyroid and taking levothyroxine, their T4 is going to look as though it's being supported and their thyroid may or may not appear good. They never tested her for antibodies. And now we are kind of like, "You should be looking at the whole picture of the thyroid." So we do this test. Her free T3, which is our active thyroid hormone, was below 2. Okay. So, all that levothyroxine that she'd been taking for 15 years, she wasn't converting into an active hormone, which is why she was feeling miserable. In addition, she had both antibodies, TPO and thyroglobulin antibodies, off the charts. So, she had a full-blown autoimmune Hashimoto's presentation, and for 15 years, her doctor had never checked. We see the same thing with HRT. We'll see a woman who's 65. She's just been diagnosed with osteoporosis. She's like, wait a minute, I was progressive. I got on the patch at 51. I have been on hormone replacement therapy for the last 14 years. How can I possibly have osteoporosis? And Marie and I are like, well, because your doctor was not dosing you or prescribing to you in order to protect you from that. They were probably just saying, I'll get rid of your hot flash, I'll lubricate your vagina, I'll make your skin a little bit look better. That's all they were concerned about. They've never checked your levels because, newsflash ladies, that is actually standard of care in the United States is do not test, do not test women's hormones in postmenopause. And so, this woman, she was mad, legitimately livid that she had porous bones and had spent 14 years on HRT that was not serving her. So, that's the other thing was that you're only going to get what the doctor's comfortable giving if he or she's willing to give you anything at all. And then by the way, they're doing a set it and forget it. They're setting the thermostat and they're walking away.

Super scary. And by the way, everybody, chapter 11, you're going to want this. And what I really love is how y'all are describing, we believe basically back to what you were saying, Maria, is that you should decide. You should go in knowing this is what I want, this is what my outcome is, but also knowing what are the different kinds of options and what are the Pros and cons to those. And based on that, here's what I want or am willing to look at. And have this list of I'm not willing to look at this. I mean, it's your body. And I think we all have— if you're over 50, we grew up like, turn it over to the doctor. Like, we go to the doctor, the doctor is God, the doctor will fix that. There was a doctor in my family, one of my cousins, My mom, I loved him, loved the fact he was the doctor. He's the doctor. I'm like, okay, yeah. And he is a great guy, don't get me wrong, but we just put them way up here as if, and then we give away our power and those days are gone.

So yeah, we'd say beware of the script pad because the other thing is that having initials after your name pretty much gives all these folks a script pad that they can write, right? That again does not mean they are the right doctor. Just because they can dispense hormone therapy does not mean they should be dispensing hormone therapy. So that's another piece of— Maria and I are like, who gave you this prescription? And then they'll be like, oh, it was my endocrinologist that they were seeing for diabetes. And you're like, are they trained in hormone therapy? Well, they're an endocrinologist. You're like, yeah, see, that's the problem. This is a nuance. And Maria likes to always say this is skilled art. Not a white coat. Exactly.

Yeah. Well, I would actually add this, Deb, and that is— and we're not anti-doctor. In fact, we've got a problem. We've got a main— we've got an issue with women who are trying to grab HRT off Amazon or off the shelf and trying to biohack their way. So we are not saying to do that, but functional medicine or anti-aging, like, you may have a better experience, but it is not a guarantee. And it doesn't matter— endocrinologist, GP, OB-GYN with menopause training, uh, functional doctor, anti-aging doctor— you— doesn't matter. You still need to know what your options are. You need to understand the process.

And I think a good friend of mine said to me when I was kind of on something, it was working and she said, it's always worked best for me when it was me working with my doctor to decide. And I knew what I wanted, what wasn't working and pushed for it. Didn't just get on and ride with it. And it's like, yeah, I needed to hear that. Thank you. All right. So for those of you who are wondering who stuck around and first of all, you now know you need the book. So I'm telling you at the end of this podcast, there's a purchase you're needing to make it, you're just going to do it. But I also want to give something to them because you talk about oxidative priority and that is putting, how do I burn more fat on my menopause body? How do I make sure I don't start storing more easier? Because that's what my changing hormones will enable me to do. Lucky us. How can I turn that around? And what is it that I want to do? I've never actually— this is the first time I've ever heard it expressed this way, oxidative priority to women in midlife or menopause. I think everybody's going for that, tell it to me like a 5-year-old can understand it. And they're saying, here's how to burn fat, but you go a lot deeper than this. And you also state it in a very easy to understand way. So to the listener who is dying right now to know, how do I do that? What do you mean by oxidative priority?

Maria, do you wanna take it?

Oh no, that's all you, Kristen.

Oh goodness. Okay. Essentially the, the body has kind of a priority in how it burns fuels, and it also has a different capacity to store fuels based on the type of macronutrient that it is or fuel source. And we're fans of keto for therapeutic interventions, for medical interventions, things like that. But unfortunately, what women are failing to understand is that we have a changing gut microbiome. We have a changing metabolism. We have a changing lipid clearance. A, a lot of change is happening kind of under the hood related to our hormonal decline, and it does change how we process macronutrients as we consume them. Fat is kind of at the top of the pole in terms of It'll be the first one that we use and the first one that we store, and we sort of have an unlimited capacity to store it. So, when these women are doing these copious amounts of high-fat diets and they can't figure out why they're not losing fat, that's— this is the reason, because we were kind of at the top of the tree in terms of this oxidative priority. Start going down then, like alcohol. Okay. So, your body is going to essentially store the fuel for use of alcohol before other things after fat. So, we all go out, we have a nice dinner, you know, dining room, and you think you're eating this, like, super healthy meal. The problem is that all of those calories after the wine or separate from the wine, guess what, ladies, those are going to get stored as fat. So, then, we have ketones. This is another thing. Everyone's, like, dumping all these ketones into their coffee and doing these things. Well, that's the third one. So, we kind of go down this—

Can I interrupt you for a second? Yeah. Just for somebody who is not sure what you mean by dumping ketones into my coffee.

Can you— Sure, like MCT oil or coconut oil usage, whatnot. So, we're looking at— there's different ketone bodies that you can purchase. A lot of times they can be powders or liquids or things like that. But people think, "This gives me brain fuel and this like cheap energy source and everything else." Sure, but maybe like before this podcast with Deb, Maria and I could have taken a shot of ketones to give us some clarity, but not along with a meal. Because guess what, then the other things that we're consuming in that meal are essentially going to get stored while we focus on utilizing the ketones first. So, we have this sort of tree, and as we start to go down, we get down towards protein. And this is the one thing that if we could get women to focus more on eating good proteins and stop with the excess fats, because let's be honest, fats are satiating as heck. I mean, throw an avocado in with your eggs, you end up eating fewer eggs than you normally would. But that's not always a good thing when we're trying to lose fat. And so, we try and explain to women, not only do we have this oxidative priority, but then there's a way to leverage different proteins in order to honor that oxidative priority as well. So, looking at getting your protein, but it doesn't have to be a T-bone. And I think, unfortunately, we've got this— again, carnivore, another great therapeutic intervention from a dietary standpoint, probably not the best long-term solution for a lot of women, but because they are focusing on the ribeyes and all of this sort of stuff. Well, guess what else a ribeye has in it? Has plenty of fats. And so, guess what, ladies, you're going to use that first and everything else starts to get stored. So, we just try and explain like there's a way to sort of decode your nutrition to make it serve you by honoring this sort of decision tree of your bodies with respect to fuel partitioning. And looking at different macronutrients and using them properly. Is that a good explanation without kind of going into the book too much?

Yeah, I think it is. And I think what I hope it does for you, listener, is pique your curiosity about what habits are you doing now that you thought were going to help you lose weight that may in fact be backfiring. Yeah, yeah, because none of us does this on purpose. It's an unintentional mistake. But again, there's so much information out there, and I think we have to always realize that the information may be coming from someone selling something, and we have to understand that kind of motivation is going to skew anything that we're factoring in.

So something— or I would say also exhibiting an aesthetic to which you aspire, and you're overlooking the fact that person's aesthetic is probably coming from being a fitness trainer their entire life, being 40 years old. They have a different sort of benefit to oxidative priority, sort of being able to blur the lines a little bit. As we age, we don't have that benefit any longer. So just take your advice from people like Deb. Don't take your advice from someone who's 40 simply because she's shredded and she looks great. And suddenly, that is health for a 55, 60, 65-year-old woman. It's not. Find someone who's there actually putting in the work and doing the hard things at the age and stage that you are in life, because she's likely honoring oxidative priority.

The youngsters probably are not. So good. All right. So as we wrap up, is there one question that you wish I would have asked you about What made you write this book and what message do you hope to send to the audience that you intended it for?

I mean, we just get, for the past probably 6 years, we get so many questions. They come in via email and they come in via Instagram. Trying to think where else they come in, in our Mighty Network community. And Whereas we would love to be able to answer all those questions, like, we can't. We burn out. And then a lot of questions really are not given to soundbite social media platforms. The book takes women on a journey. I call it a journey of understanding. It was like it was laid out in a very specific way. It's just a journey of learning, really, and understanding why we say in Chapter 5 what we say is because we laid a groundwork for what we mean in Chapter 5 in, say, Chapters 3 and 4. So I would say just to reach a broader set of women and to answer a lot of questions that are just difficult to answer via social media.

Yeah, I think we always say the best menopause is going to be an empowered menopause, and an empowered menopause comes from knowledge. And whether you're 30 and you've been told, like, it's coming, fear it, or you're 60 and you're in the throes of it, or you're 48 and you really palpably feel it, we all are lacking knowledge because of sort of the things that we've been told going all the way back to when we first got our periods as young girls. And what we wanted to say was, stop focusing on symptoms. This is actually not about losing your menstrual cycle or losing your fertility. There's so much more going on here. And if we just sort of stepped back and understood our bodies a little bit better, how our hormones were serving us, not battling against us all those years that we were angry with our cycle, women would feel more like, aha, I get it. And then they'd be able to say, so how do I then make sure that as I age, I do so in a healthful manner? They'll see the tie back to those hormones, and they'll understand very clearly what it is they want to do.

Love it. Okay, so I'm going to ask you one more question. Fast forward, so it's 20 years from now, you're now 75. What do you think you'll be doing then?

Oh, I hope we've both traveled to our heart's content. Marie and I are travel junkies. I hope that we have oodles of grandchildren, and I hope that we're showing women that we don't have to be hunched over and using a walker and doing all these things. And that's not to disparage any of those who've ended up in that situation. Those women unfortunately were kept in the dark about true options that would've preserved their health. We're hoping that we've preserved our health in such a way as to show people that, wow, 50+ is probably the best time of life. And that people aspire to kind of dig in and make those changes.

Anything to add, Maria? Well, Kristin used the traveled in the past tense. I hope to still be agile and traveling, but I don't disagree with anything that she said.

Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so where can everybody find you and get their hands on the book?

So the book is available anywhere books are sold, so Amazon, Barnes Noble, I think hopefully in independent booksellers as well.

Yeah, independent booksellers. Yep. We've got a page on our website, wiseandwell.me, that's to the book. They can find, you know, we understand people want to buy at their local stores, things like that. So you can find it there.

Instagram, Maria? Yeah, just Wise and Well on Instagram. Yep. And then our website is wiseandwell.me.

Yep. Beautiful. Thank you so much for being here, but also for writing the book for everybody and for the work you do every day.

Thank you.

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